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The Dividend Aristocrats' Etiquette Lesson for Apple

Dividends pay.

On the back of yesterday's Cyprus-inspired losses, stocks opened slightly higher this morning, with the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC) and the narrower, price-weighted Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES:^DJI) up 0.23% and 0.32%, respectively, at 10:15 a.m. EST.

Dividends pay offYesterday's Cypriot flu roiled global markets with a bout of "risk on," but at least one group was less volatile than the broad market: high-quality dividend shares. In fact, this group has been beating the market this year -- in some cases (depending on how you select your dividend payers) by a wide margin.

The following chart shows the year-to-date performance of three dividend-focused ETFs -- the First Trust Morningstar Dividend Leaders Index Fund, the SPDR S&P Dividend ETF (NYSEMKT:SDY), and the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (NYSEMKT:VIG) -- relative to that of the S&P 500:

All three ETFs are beating the market. Furthermore, it's the stalwart dividend engines -- those with the longest, most consistent track records of dividend increases -- that have posted the greatest margin of outperformance. (Incidentally, the ranking of performance is the same over the past 12 months.)

Indeed, the SPDR S&P Dividend ETF tracks the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats index, which contains companies drawn from the S&P 1500 that that have raised dividends annually over a minimum 20-year period -- a remarkable achievement. Surprisingly, only two of the SPDR ETF's top 10 holdings are Dow components: AT&T and Johnson & Johnson.

That ought to be a lesson to cash-heavy technology companies -- most prominent among them Apple(NASDAQ:AAPL). While it will be long time before the maker of the iPad can be considered for inclusion in the Dividend Aristocrats Index (Apple declared its first dividend in 16 years in 2012), a healthy increase in its dividend could endear it to shareholders both old and new and help reverse the negative sentiment that has brutalized the shares since last September. At 2.4%, Apple's dividend yield is already above that of the S&P 500, but it can do better yet, which would give it more price-appreciation potential for it to square the two yields.